Originally Posted by Toto

There's no need to shout. You can't get the drift of Detering's argument from the title. Pliny is not a witness to the historical Jesus in any case, so it's not clear why he would even need to construct an argument about these letters.

Originally Posted by Minimalist

You are wrong, aa. If Eusebius had thought to "go back" and plant a reference to the TF before his own it would now be accepted by almost everyone.

If someone forged that nondescript letter from Pliny - which does not say what xtians would want it to say - and then decided to interpolate a reference to that letter in Tertullian that forger would have been a bloody fucking genius. If he was that smart, he would have given Pliny a bullet-point list of xtian propaganda as it existed in the 4th century....just like the TF.

Originally Posted by mountainman

The letter exchange between King Agbar and Jesus was once very brazenly convenient but alas times have changed. The letter exchange between "Dear Paul" and "Dear Seneca" was once very brazenly convenient but alas times have moved forward. The "TF" in Josephus was once very brazenly convenient but alas attitudes have become more sceptical and less accepting of pious forgery. The references to the "Big J. and/or the nation of Christians" in Tacitus, Suetonus, Marcus Aurelius, the Pliny-Trajan correspondence, Cassius Dio and Galen were all very convenient for the ancient Christian organisation that preserved these references in their massive libraries of high technology (hand-written) codices.

"Here!" They would say to those, who seeking the historical truth, had enquired after evidence. "Here is the proof"! And if they needed any more proof after the 9th century, they requested a (temporary) inter-ecclesiastical-library loan from one of the best appointed monastic libraries in all of Carolingian Europe, the Corbie library.


The pious religious forgery mill has been a money and power spinner for aeons. We don't even need to accuse the 1st millennium of Christians of doing something that other pious forgers have not done in all other "book" religions (Quranic compilers, Smith et al) since time immemorial: that they have knowingly fabricated (manuscript and epigraphic) evidence to substantiate their own mythological history because they had the "divine right" to do so.

The historically fabricated jesus story seems to be a bit like the pot of gold that one always hears is at the end of the rainbow. Well the sun of critical questioning is on the rise again, and the rainbow is fast dissolving into the heavens above.

Originally Posted by Minimalist

Xtians wanted to hear that their allegedly holy martyrs "cursed christ and sacrificed to Trajan?" Sorry. That is simply absurd. A xtian forger would have had Pliny burning them in oil while they sang hymns to "jesus."

But even more outlandish is the idea that someone would deliberately go back and plant a phony reference so that centuries later people would say "Ah ha! Look, Tertullian said its real!" They were writing for centuries in the future. They were writing for right then.

Sorry, my friend. Your argument is unconvincing.